Jessica Yellin Is Flipping The Script On The TV News Model That Stresses Us All Out

After years of working her way toward and eventually landing one of the most high-profile gigs in journalism — that of chief White House correspondent for CNN — something happened to Jessica Yellin that she never expected on that long ascent to the top.

It was actually a conclusion she finally reached: That the jargon-filled and conflict-driven brand of cable TV news coverage was increasingly putting off viewers. Sort of like forcing them to watch a movie that had already been playing for half an hour. What’s that term mean? Who are these people? How did this conflict start, and why does it matter?

If you’re familiar with Yellin from Instagram, where she’s built a community of more than half a million followers, you already know where this is going. Her hypothesis — that TV news is turning off too many people and flat-out ignoring others completely — is the reason she set out to build an independent digital news brand of her own. The concept, as she explained it to me, called for leaning heavily on curation and service journalism. Or, in her words: “We tell you the news that matters, and the noise you can ignore.”

Flipping the TV news script

The result was “News Not Noise,” which Yellin launched, to start, as an Instagram feed built around a straightforward, bite-sized, just-the-facts news presentation that felt — to Yellin’s core audience — like a breath of fresh air. Celebrity fans like Jessica Seinfeld and Amy Schumer brought more attention, more followers. And in recent weeks, Yellin has continued fleshing the operation out into a growing — and profitable — multi-platform media enterprise.

Just a few weeks ago, she added a podcast to the mix. There’s also a newsletter for her followers, as well as a Patreon community. The News Not Noise Patreon includes membership tiers that — for $10, $20, and $100 per month — come with benefits that range from exclusive content from experts to a biweekly live Q&A with Yellin herself.

All of this means Yellin today operates like a kind of hybrid CEO, news anchor, and managing editor (since she now has a News Not Noise team around her, including a content creator and editor). And the Q&As foster an indispensable level of interaction with her community that’s part of what led to her dissatisfaction with covering the news on TV in the first place. The old “this is what we’ve decided the news is — take it or leave it” approach was, she felt, leaving too many viewers out in the cold.

That, by the way, is also a good segue to the thing that really distinguishes what Yellin is trying to do here from her TV news days, more than anything else. It’s the frequency with which she taps a mental health expert to interact with her community.

News Not Noise: “We give you information — not a panic attack.”

“We actually have a stable of expert voices who can offer practical strategies for handling the anxiety of the world we’re living and the news you’re taking in,” Yellin told me about their advice, which can be something as simple as walking the members of her community through a meditation.

For a recent episode of the new podcast, Yellin brought on Shelly Tygielski, the founder of “Pandemic of Love.” She’s a mindfulness teacher and author of the new book Sit Down to Rise Up: How Radical Self-Care Can Change the World. In an Instagram post, Yellin asked her community: “What does it mean to live with intention? How do you ‘sit with uncomfortable feelings?’ And why should you?”

Yellin continues: “In this podcast episode, Shelly goes deep on the purpose of getting centered. She says it's not about only having positive emotions or driving to your goals. It's about finding a place of peace so you can move through life with love. And crucially, she explains, meditation is not about comfort but about learning to sit with discomfort. This, (she) argues, is key to living a fulfilling life.”

When you think about it, that actually fits quite nicely with the reason Yellin wanted to launch News Not Noise. It’s not just about the news-filled posts and stories, on everything from the importance of Build Back Better to helping people support small businesses over the holidays and the details surrounding the new COVID-19 Omicron variant. 

She’s trying to cover the news — and, even more broadly, help people better understand the world around them — in such a way that it doesn’t leave people “panicked and confused all the time.”

A different way of covering the news

“The world is filled with so much genuinely scary stuff,” Yellin told me, “that if we want to keep people calm enough to engage, (then) I want to help people get the tools they need to do that. Otherwise, they’ll just zone out, is my fear.

“Sometimes, people just want to know what they can ignore, right? You’re going to hear people outraged about this and that. Don’t worry about it. I’ll tell you when it’s time to worry. I’m sort of saying: In your limited time to take this in? Here are the things that are really important.”

Her post over the weekend, about the worrisome Omicron variant, is one example of the style of news presentation on offer here. Everyone is watching this one so closely, she writes, because scientists say this variant has such a high number of mutations on the spike protein (30) which the COVID virus uses to attach to and infect human cells.

On one key part of the spike protein, she continues, it has 10 mutations. Compared to just two for the COVID-19 Delta variant. “For now,” her post concluded, “the same protocols are advised: Masks, social distancing, vaccines and boosters.” Just the facts, right? And, for good measure, she stresses to everybody that there’s no cause for worry yet. Rather, no evidence-based cause for worry. Scientists still need a couple of weeks or so to get a feel for the full scope of the Omicron variant’s capabilities.

An alternative to “competing for people’s anxiety”

When you look at the precipitous ratings declines that Fox, CNN, and MSNBC have all experienced this year, it’s hard not to feel like Yellin is on to something here. That the status quo, in other words, could do with an overhaul.

Indeed, all three networks are down from last year’s election-fueled highs. CNN’s numbers, in fact, are down a staggering 73%. And while a CNN source cautioned to me that a decline is not unusual following an extraordinary election year, a new Columbia Journalism Review piece blasted the network for an “exaggerated tone and graphic content increasingly (pushing) it into the realm of tabloid-like material.”

Without addressing that specific point, Yellin did offer her perspective on the same thing much more generally.

“I just think the thing about every news story has to be about conflict, that conflict sells — that’s one way of seeing the news,” she said. “And one way of seeing storytelling. Fear drives attention. Sure, it does work. I happen to think that the downside cost of that drives away some audience. And that there’s another way to do it. Instead of competing for people’s anxiety, inspire their curiousty and passion.”